Reimagining the Female Superhero | Lindsey Morris at Girls Gone Geek (June 18): “Saturday I attended a panel at Special Edition: NYC, and from what I gathered it was one of the only panels that day that was even nearing maximum capacity. The totally stellar line-up of creators for the talk included Gail Simone, Amy Reeder, Marguerite Bennett, Emanuela Lupacchino and Jenny Frison – moderated by Ben Saunders. This panel and its participants were great in every respect, and it produced some great conversations. [This] is the entire discussion prior to Q&A.”

Gale Simone to writers: Keep the hell up | Shaula Evans at The Black Board (June 17): “When the idea of an Incredible Hulk reboot came up at a recent John August/ Craig Mazin Scriptntoes podcast, their guest screenwriter David S. Goyer (who is writing the first film that Wonder Woman will appear in) called She Hulk “a green porn star that only Hulk could f***” […] Comic book writer Gail Simone, whose notable works include Wonder Woman, Red Sonja, and Batgirl, responded on Twitter. I’ve archived her remarks here because she has some GREAT and on-point advice to writers in all media about the need to “keep the hell up” with our audiences and the changing world around us.”

Keynote: Composing a Functional Community | Katie Miller at Erlang Solutions (June 16): [Video] “We know the wonderful benefits of functional programming, but when it comes to sharing the lambda love we often do a poor job. In this presentation, Katie will draw on her experiences as a journalist, workshop instructor, functional programming student and women’s group founder to take you back to that time before you knew what jargon such as monad meant, and offer ideas and inspiration for helping people of all kinds and categories along the path to FP enlightenment. Be warned, content may challenge the status quo and your mind: be prepared for code in an unfamiliar syntax.”

Female leaders are missing in academia | Tanya Fitzgerald at The Conversation (June 18): “The persistent numerical imbalance of women and men at senior levels in universities does not appear to be cause for concentrated and wider concern. […] we need to think beyond simply counting more women in by increasing their numbers. While numbers are important to create a critical mass, it is a change in attitude towards female leaders that is needed.”

Is Coding the New Literacy? | Tasneem Raja at Mother Jones (June 16): “What if learning to code weren’t actually the most important thing? It turns out that rather than increasing the number of kids who can crank out thousands of lines of JavaScript, we first need to boost the number who understand what code can do. As the cities that have hosted Code for America teams will tell you, the greatest contribution the young programmers bring isn’t the software they write. It’s the way they think. It’s a principle called “computational thinking”.”

Too Fat to Be a Scientist? | Rachel Fox at The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 17): [Warning for discussion of harassment] “I can’t stay in a field where it seems that I’m supposed to apologize for my appearance every day. Although there’s a growing movement to promote a more nuanced model of weight loss and metabolism, the mentality that everything comes down to a lack of self-control is still pervasive in the scientific community.”

Silence is Complicity | Natalie Luhrs at The Radish. (Jun 16): [Warning for discussion of harassment and sexual abuse of children] “If you deliberately prey on vulnerable members of our community and continue to do so after you’ve been caught, I believe that you forfeit the right to be a part of our community.”

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How To Be Inclusive: “To create cultures of inclusion, you first have to make acts of inclusion. A culture of inclusion is about offering help before offering criticism. It’s about knowing that everyone’s circumstances are different, and understanding those circumstances before jumping to judgement or conclusions. It’s about teaching, it’s about learning, and it’s about knowing that you can learn from the same people you can teach.”

No More Objectification: “The widely-covered “Objectify a man in tech” day started out as a lark that emerged when I got fed up with experiencing — and seeing other women writers and presenters in gaming and tech — fielding irrelevant compliments on their appearance when people referenced their work.”

How do you edit Wikipedia?: “Wikipedia is seen as having a particular culture: valuing openness, cooperation and transparency, commited to the idea of “neutrality”, often adversarial and prone to edit wars and aggressive behaviour. I see myself as only partly fitting into this culture.”

Interdependence and Strong Female Characters: “As long as we insist that female characters can only be strong through total independence, we do both them and women in the real world a disservice. The real mark of strength isn’t in how much of a loner you can be, how much you can isolate yourself, but how you can strike a balance, maintaining your strength and integrity while being unafraid to build emotional connections with other people.”

A field guide to privilege in marine science: some reasons why we lack diversity: Scientists don’t always recognize the additional barrers, besides hard work, that prevent people from succeeding at science… Here, I present a short field guide to type of privilege that I’ve observed in science, and explain why becoming a scientist becomes immensely more difficult for people without that form of privilege.”

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Why do you write strong female characters?: “The heart of the question implies that if a male character is ‘strong’ that’s to be expected, because boys and men are strong. Normal. Default. Go about your business. But if a female character leads a story, does stuff, has a voice and a purpose and changes her life or others’ lives or starts or stops a war or makes a stand or has power then it’s newsworthy, because that’s not expected, not true to life. Not normal. Not our default assumption about girls. So stop and take note.”

Play with my V spot? | VentureBeat: “Guys, this is why we don’t have more women in tech: It’s a cesspool. As long as we’re passing offensive schlock like this off as marketing for a major technology conference, we don’t deserve more women in tech.”

Don’t underestimate Viking women: “‘To assume that Viking men were ranked above women is to impose modern values on the past, which would be misleading,’ cautions Marianne Moen. She has been studying how women’s status and power is expressed through Viking burial findings. Her master’s thesis The Gendered Landscape argues that viking gender roles may have been more complex than we assume.”

A Remarkable Number of Women: “You can tell you’re in a male-dominated discipline in the sciences when a gathering of three or more women working, standing, or sitting together in a professional setting in that field is considered ‘remarkable.'”

Take the pledge: Don’t serve on all-male panels: “A hopeful new trend is growing: People are noticing when conference speakers are all or mostly men (and often all white as well). And they are asking questions: What kind of selection process results in an all or mostly male speaker lineup? Is it true that all the best speakers just happen to white men, or are there other qualified speakers who are getting passed over? No one thinks these conferences are deliberately signing up only men, but they do think that all-male lineups are a sign of not trying very hard to get the best speakers. One solution is for men to publicly pledge only to participate in panels that have at least one woman on them, as Rebecca Rosen proposed in The Atlantic last week.”

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So Long, Barbie Dreamhouse: Roominate Gets Girls Excited About Architecture and Engineering: “When Jennifer Kessler, Alice Brooks, and Bettina Chen were first-year masters students at Stanford, they couldn’t help but notice a striking absence of women in their math and science classes. Wanting to inspire an enthusiasm for the hard sciences in younger generations of girls, the women created Roominate, a buildable toy dollhouse that teaches kids about subjects like architecture and engineering, their website reports. Roominate is a stackable set of dollhouse rooms, made for girls ages 6-10. Each set includes build-your-own furniture, circuit boards, color-coded wires and a mini-motor to operate lights, fans and buzzers. Once girls decide on an overall structure for their houses, they can choose to wire each room for light or electronics, take apart and reassemble the customizable furniture, and even change the wallpaper as they see fit.”

Amazon Customers Go Rogue, Hilariously Review Bic’s Idiotic Pen for Women: “We’ve discussed the ridiculousness of Bic for Her — the pen specially marketed towards women, which, no, does not mean that they’re branded with the face of Betty Friedan — in the past, but it seems that consumers have now taken the mocking of the product into their own hands via Amazon UK, a site where you can now find page after page of brilliant and hilarious fake product reviews from clever users who are alternately thrilled that there’s finally a tool that women can write with, confused because they’ve never seen a pen before or concerned about the dangerous path that allowing women to write will inevitably lead us down.”

A Challenger Appears for the Fake Geek Girl Meme: “But if there’s one we wouldn’t mind eradicating from the internet, it’d be the Idiot Nerd Girl Advice Animal meme. It’s emblematic of the persisting idea that tells people it’s ok to nastily call women out for not being “authentically geeky” enough… Dark Horse Comics editor Rachel Edidin, however, had the idea to try and turn that around a week ago, by creating a sort of anti-meme that, instead of presuming that the pictured girl is pretending to like nerdy things in order to get attention, presumes that the girl actually knows her stuff and is tired of people assuming she doesn’t because of her gender. And a week later? A quick check of QuickMeme is about half full with defiant nerd girls.”

[Trigger Warning: Sexual Violence]Joss Whedon Is The Tim Wise of Sci-Fi: “He includes ~strong female characters~, feminist characters, queer characters in his work. Great, I’m in. But then he proceeds to do really gross things to them. He undermines them, tears them down, places them into incredibly misogynist and abusive frameworks and then frames their heroism as clawing their way up out of that (if it doesn’t kill them) without adding anything new to the discussion. Then he proceeds to collect praise for confronting issues when he’s not really confronting them so much as using them as cheap narrative devices.”

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Applications to attend the Ada Initiative’s AdaCamp DC close today. AdaCamp DC is a 150-200 person unconference in Washington, D.C. on July 10-11, 2012, focused on the subject of “women in open technology and culture.” (Attendees of any gender are welcome provided they demonstrate sufficient interest in and expertise in the topic.)

Yammer joins Etsy, 37signals in funding Hacker School grants : “these grants also send a public signal about something very important to us at Yammer: cognitive diversity. When people organize to solve a problem, they each bring to the table their own cognitive tools—worldviews, strategies, tactics, facts, skills, quirks, past experiences, hangups, etc.—all of which are inextricably linked with who they are and what they’ve done.”

Feminist Hacker News | Composite : “At a couple of conferences lately, Hackmeet and She’s Geeky, as well as at the feminist science fiction convention WisCon, I hosted a discussion of feminist hackers and feminist hacking. I wanted to put the idea out into the world and see what other women had to say about it.”

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Seeing the Future in Science Fiction: Famed science fiction author William Gibson writes that for a “curious, anxious, white male child coming of age in an incurious and paranoid white monoculture, there was literally nothing like it—though a great deal of science fiction, possibly the majority of it, I was starting to notice, depicted futuristic monocultures that were dominated by white males.”

Not All Feminists Are Alike: a Gamer’s Perspective : An RPG based explanation of some differences between feminist. Or, to quote a commenter there, “knowing someone who agrees with you who physically approximates me does not invalidate my feelings or input on a topic.”

Two posts on problems with informal networks of reporting harassment at conferences

Why Will And Jada Pinkett Smith Let Daughter Willow Cut Her Hair : “She has got to have command of her body. So when she goes out into the world, she’s going out with a command that it is hers. She is used to making those decisions herself. We try to keep giving them those decisions until they can hold the full weight of their lives.”

Gender/Play: The Problems, Promise, and Pleasures of Video Game Crossplaying (part 1) : “‘crossplaying’ gender too often serves to confirm the same harmful ideologies which reduce the bodies of others to objects of desire (or, sometimes, revulsion). But it also produces potentialities: the promise of surprising, often radical re-imaginings of the ways we understand—and are bound by—concepts like gender, sexuality, and identity.”

Why I Write “Strong Female Characters” : “People always ask Rucka why he chooses to write so many hard-hitting women. And now, to celebrate the release of his new novel Alpha, he’s explaining why.”

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Nurture affects gender differences in spatial abilities. In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society. (Mainstream audience summary at Ars Technica.)

(Warning: screenshots of video game violence.) “Did she just money-shot herself with his neck-blood?”: And in a patriarchal society where masculine = good, strong and feminine = bad, weak these women (made by dudes for dudes) exist as tokens of counterfeit empowerment because they enact male fantasies of power. This is why the femme fatale, despite having no narrative agency, is sold as a strong character.

The Luxury of “Reasonable”: But there’s a reason [Brandon] Sanderson can be so reasonable [about his faith-based anti-homosexuality beliefs]… He’s not being told he can’t bring his boyfriend to his own prom. Agents/editors aren’t rejecting his work because he wrote about LGBT characters. He’s not being denied basic rights…

Different takes on rape and negative portrayals of women in George R.R. Martin’s fiction (meta discussion, some satirical, not graphic):

Feminist Media Criticism, George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, And That Sady Doyle Piece: Alyssa Rosenberg criticises Sady Doyle’s take, in particular that she reads it as coming close to stating that no artistic depiction of sexual violence is acceptable, and that the anti-geek tone is harmful. Now, sexism is more entrenched and more broadly impactful than disdain for nerds. But that doesn’t actually mean that these kinds of statements are useful or clever when they’re deployed by feminists against nerds…

So seriously, why aren’t there more women in science?: Yes, the perennial question, but there are some brief interviews with some leading women scientists: Cathy Foley, CSIRO division chief; Suzanne Cory, Australian Academy of Science President; Mahananda Dasgupta professor in ANU Department of Nuclear Physics and others.

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It’s been almost two and a half years since the last episode of Battlestar Galactica aired. It’s been two and a half years since we’ve had a show where a diverse group of women played a central role in a major sci-fi production. Am I the only one who misses not only the show but the possibilities that the show presented?

Here’s the latest Justice League comic cover– Wonder Woman the lone female character surrounded five males. She is the only one in her underwear looking not so much like an invulnerable superhero and more like some male comic book artist’s dominatrix sex fantasy

There’s a lot of talk going around the intarwebs this week about the Oh, You Sexy Geek panel at San Diego Comic Con. Basically, this was supposed to address the implications of the sexy womenin nerd culture.

(Warning, some of the language in this post seems slut-shaming to this linkspammer.)

These calls for strong female characters start to run into trouble with trans women, nonwhite women, and women of colour in pop culture. Because women in all three of these categories are automatically expected to be strong.

What infuriates me the most about posts like these is that people have the nerve to make blanket statements about gender based on their own experience. So you’ve found startup life and family hard to juggle? Write about that…

First off: Pink! Pink is every girl’s favorite color… As an alternative to these measures, you can treat women like unique individuals whose desires and aspirations can’t be pinned down by their gender.

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I see this coming up again and again in discussions about pop culture; this is an attitude I myself once embraced and espoused, like it was a badge of honor to dislike most female characters. I thought I was being oh-so-edgy and critiquing female characters when really I was engaging in an age-old form of misogyny, where people prove how progressive they are by saying they hate women.

I know, it sounds weird. But there is a thing that happens where some feminists declare themselves firmly to be ‘one of the guys.’ I’m not sure if it’s a defensive tactic, designed to flip some attitudes about feminism and feminists, or if there is a genuine belief that being feminist means ‘being one of the guys.’ Once you are ‘one of the guys,’ you of course need to prove it by bashing on women, because this is what ‘guys’ do, yes? So you say that you don’t really ‘connect with’ or ‘like’ female characters you encounter in pop culture.

If feminists feel pressure to be accepted as “one of the guys,” imagine how geek women feel, particularly early in their lives, when they often feel isolated from one another.

This tendency to dislike female character reminds me of anotherÂ “being one of the guys” strategy: I often meet women who tell me proudly, “I just don’t get along with women.* All of my best friends have been guys.” These womenÂ also oftenÂ think that this fact actually makes themÂ progressive (because nothing’s more radical than failing to create female-centric relationships!). And most of the women I’ve known whoÂ say this are geeks. It’s actually one of the reasons it took so long for me to become friends with geeks, because “I don’t get along with women” is dealbreaker for me. Any woman who says this is either a) telling me that I can never expect more than perfunctory friendship with them or b) inviting me to denigrate women as well, as the basis of our friendship. And no thank you.

Which is not, of course, to say that these ladies are horrible people. Women who refuse to connect with other women, fictional or real, are not causing the problem, but perpetuating it, because they’ve bought patriarchal narratives about women hook, line, and sinker. They seek connections with men, because men are the rational, smarter set, and by doing so they feel required toÂ malign their own genders, because, as smith points out, “bashing on women” is just what dudes do.Â But loving other women, connecting with other women, is one of the most radical feminist act one can perform. And I think that goes for fictional characters, too, especially since I know that my personal path to feminism would have been greatly hindered if it weren’t for Xena and Buffy.

So it hurts my heart when geeks inexplicably “hate” female characters on geek shows. Indeed, the two examples smith uses are actually from geeky/fantasy/SF shows: True Blood and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It seems likeÂ misogynist write-offs of female characters areÂ disturbingly prevalent inÂ allegedly progressive fan cultures (like the overtly feminist Buffy), and the ones that have been pissing me off lately are, of course, Doctor Who-related. A sizeable part of DW and TorchwoodÂ fandomsÂ has a lot of ire for female characters from these series. The two I want to focus on, in part becauseÂ hatred of these characters is well-represented in both fan communitities, areÂ Gwen Cooper (from Torchwood) and River Song (from Doctor Who).

[Spoilers for season 5 of Doctor Who and Torchwood: Children of Earth (season 3) below the fold.]

Feminism vs geek culture?: liliacsigil notes that Anna N is talking about commercially produced geek media, and that geek culture is not monolithic and has many women and feminists, and returns to the issue of “strong women characters” in geek media.

Study: Pay, Promotion Limits Lead Women to Exit Engineering: ‘What’s for sure is that “it’s not about math or getting your hands dirty,” says Hunt. “It’s not because these women mistakenly wandered into engineering.'”. (Also, WTF at ad inserted into the article: “See iPhone apps for new moms.”)

Being Inclusive vs Not Being Exclusive: ‘A group of people put on some creative project, and someone notices that thereâ€™s a lack of representation of X Minority for whatever reason, sometimes noting that they themselves are in the minority. The people organising the project get defensive and say â€œBut weâ€™re not excluding anyone! We are open to everybody! They just need to sign on!â€ There is a huge difference between not being exclusive and being inclusive.’ (Via FWD.)

Research Conversations: Munmun De Choudhury writes about her computer science research on homophily in social networks, that is, similar people forming connections.

In Australia the Victorian Department of Transport is offering $10 000 Women in Transport Scholarships to female, full-time or part-time students starting or completing postgraduate studies in transport-related fields.

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